Journal New York City

  All I can say is wow, this city never ends.  When we approached the skyline I was awstruck by the size of this city.  I had seen it in movies and stuff but they dont do it justice.  After settling into Joey's cousins place, who was out of town for the week and was kind enough to lend us his pad, we headed out for the East Village, which wasn't too far considering his place was a couple blocks from the empire state building.  We walked looking for a cool place to hang out and who would have guessed it, we ended up at a place called Houlahans, Irish Bar of course.  We talked over Fosters with the bartender, extreme Irish accent and all, for awhile and ended up staying there for most of the night.  We even got drinks on the house which i have never gotten before.  From there we headed out to this place called the Telephone Booth or something like that, famous for being a Swidish women  hangout, although we didnt see anything too impresive.  We left there on a hunt for true New York pizza which we found about a block away.  As you can seee from the picture it was as good as they say it is.   After that we headed home for the night, ready for the big tourist day ahead.  We spent the next day walking the city.  We started off by walkin to Times Square which was unbelievable.  It was jam packed with people and there was soo much goin on it was dizzying.  From the pictures you can see what we saw, pretty much all the hotspots from Rockefeller Center to Central Park.  Every block there was something recognizable.  We looked for Carson Daily at MTV studios, no luck, and Katie Couric at NBC news, no luck either.   David Letterman was in London so we didn't get a chance to see a taping of his show but we did see where it was shot.  We grubbed on their famous New York hotdogs, a buck a piece from the street venders, which was neccassary considering parking for the two nighs costs around $40.  To have a car in that city would be insane, it cost 4 bucks to go over any bridge or under any tunnel, crazy if you ask me.  We also went up to the top of the Empire State building, which is where those high pictures are from.  Nice view of a huge city.  It was weird to stand outside that high up, I lost feeling in my legs.  On our way out of the city we stopped by Battery Park to get as close as we could to the Statue of Liberty.  The river was frozen out to about 200 yards and the statue was a lot farther then i had thought it was from the city shore (a lot closer to Jersey.)   Overall, it was a very impressive city but awfully expensive to live in, i hope the salarys are high!